Flexural Behavior of Sandwich Composite Made of JFRP Honeycomb as Core and GFRP as Skin

Abstract

The increasing demand of lightweight, strong and sustainable materials in aerospace, automobile and marine sectors is leading towards the development of new materials and structures. The sandwich composite is one of them which is well-known for their high strength to weight ratio and the fiber based sandwich structures with cellular core show comparatively good mechanical, acoustic, thermal and energy absorption properties than metallic cellular structure. The purpose of this work is to fabricate a sandwich structure with jute fiber reinforced polymer composite (JFRP) as core and glass fiber reinforced polymer composite (GFRP) as face sheet and to investigate bending properties of the fabricated structures for varying face sheet thicknesses. Skin and core honeycomb strips of the sandwich composites were manufactured using hand layup method and steel mold was used to obtain honeycomb shape. Flexural test results show that face sheet thickness has significant effect on the flexural behavior such as peak load, flexural strength and energy absorption. The failure mechanism during bending tests were also identified which would serve as a basis for future improvement of manufactured composites. The delamination at the interface between the core and the face sheet was the first catastrophic failure during bending. The presented sandwich structures are able to carry a significant amount of load even after failure.